Pirates get seat in EU parliament

The Swedish
Pirate Party has managed to win a seat in the European Parliament, showing
politicians that people have had a gutsful of laws that favour the music and
film industry.

The party wants to legalise Internet filesharing and beef up
web privacy winning 7.1 percent of votes, taking one of Sweden's 18 seats in
the European parliament, with ballots in 5,659 constituencies out of 5,664
counted. After the Lisbon treaty coming into effect Sweden gets 20 seats and the Pirate Party will most likely get a second seat.

Candidate Anna Troberg told Swedish telly that privacy issues
and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that
clearly when they voted. Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's
conservative Moderates won 18.8 percent of votes seems to be the main victim
of the Pirate Party's rise in the polls.

The Swedes will vote next year
in a General Election and analysts think it will be a fight to the death for
the two main parties. This means that the last thing that either of them
want are the pirates winning any seats. Both are likely to have to make
concessions on P2P and privacy if they want to keep the Pirate Party out of
parliament.